Incompetent Design is blasphemous

[dougo]

Mark Kleiman has an interesting summary of a talk by Francisco Ayala about Darwin, natural selection, and Intelligent Design. Some surprising (to me) factoids:

Darwin, by removing from God the direct responsibility for the enormous cruelties that natural selection creates, was actually a disguised friend of religion, as some theologians of his own period recognized.

The current official Catholic teaching, as enunciated by John Paul II, is that Darwin's theory is one of the supreme accomplishments of the human mind and in no way contrary to Scripture.

Comments

[bookwormb.livejournal.com]

You know, as a raised-Catholic current-agnostic and self-diagnosed 'spiritual-but-not-into-organized-religion' humanist (currently pretending=to-be-Unitarian/Universalist) --whew!-- I have to say I have never understood the Protestant/Evolutionary Theory pseudo-dichotomy, when there clearly is to me, no reason for it. Why couldn't there be a God overarching all that science? Where is the conflict? I just don't see it, and happily neither does my 10 year old (and I trust her judgement on these things more than my own, only in that it is less contaminated, so to speak).

[dkw.livejournal.com]

I'm with bookwormb on this one (except substitute Lutheran for Catholic). Give God credit for some subtlety. Picking the fine structure constant just so. Arranging that clever energy exchange between electricity and magnetism. Setting up an evolutionary process that just tries lots of things and naturally selects what works. There's plenty of wonder in the science we think we do understand, and plenty more in what we still don't.